Apple once planned an iPad with only 8 GB
An Apple prototype collector has discovered a device that fortunately never came onto the market: an entry-level iPad from 2011 that was barely usable.
iPad with 8 GB: This much RAM is normal today.
(Image: Screenshot AppleDemoYT/YouTube)
Apple is said to have considered launching a very basic tablet on the market. YouTuber AppleDemoYT, who collects prototypes and other rarities from Apple's history, presented the hardware in a video – and calls it "the worst iPad that Apple has never released". Technically, it is an iPad 2, the second generation of Apple tablets, which the company launched on the market in March 2011. The special feature: instead of the usual entry-level memory size of just under 16 GB, Apple wanted to offer it with only 8 GB, i.e. with half the memory. The idea was apparently to market a budget-friendly device, possibly for newcomers or schools –, but it probably wouldn't have been much fun.
From the year Steve Jobs died
From the beginning, iPads were always available with 16 GB. With the iPad 2, you could also have 32 or 64 GB of flash memory as an alternative. A 1 GHz dual-core ARM chip based on the Cortex-A9 ran internally. This came from Samsung (i.e. not yet from TSMC) and was later referred to as the A5. The SoC had access to 512 MByte DDR2 RAM. Steve Jobs took over the presentation at the Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco, although he was already very unwell at the time and was actually on sick leave from Apple – He died in October of the same year.
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According to AppleDemoYT, the hardware he discovered was a prototype. There is an "8GB" label on the back, which was also confirmed in tests of the hardware. Rumors of an 8 GB iPad 2 were indeed circulating at the time, including from the Taiwanese electronics trade journal DigiTimes. And it would not have been entirely inappropriate, as there were still iPhones with only 8 GB in 2012. However, if you have many apps and a lot of content – Especially videos – onto the hardware quickly fell behind.
Main memory of Macs now twice as large
Nowadays, 128 GB is the minimum for iPhones and iPads. With the iPhone 17 Pro models, 256 GB is now the norm. The RAM on Macs is now – and after years of user pleas – at least 16 GB, twice as large as the flash memory in the prototype iPad 2.
The 8 GB iPad does not run a normal iOS (later: iPadOS), but a test operating system. There is not much that can be done with it in practice, but the hardware is certainly interesting.
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